Citation

Carvalho FS, Machado CAS, Araújo PHC, Bernucci LLB, Quintanilha JA. Case Stud. Transp. Policy 2021; 9(4): 1860-1867.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, World Conference on Transport Research Society, Publisher Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.cstp.2021.10.006

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Vehicle crashes are globally considered a public health problem, and efforts are increasing to create safe road projects to avoid their occurrences. One of the most studied contributing factors is the surface condition of the roads, especially in regards to the skid resistance and weather conditions that may affect them. Studies suggest that the implementation of interventions such as asphalt resurfacing aiming to increase the pavement surface drainage and friction combined with the observation of its effects on the number of wet-road crashes aids in reducing such events. In this context, the objective of this study is to quantify the safety effectiveness of pavement resurfacing using unidirectional data from the northbound road of the Régis Bittencourt Highway - BR116, a Brazilian road. Two experimental sections were selected and received a surface replacement of a thin layer of gap-graded asphalt. The effectiveness of the intervention was estimated by the Empirical Bayes before-after (EB) and the Difference-in-Differences (DID) methods. While the former returned a reduction value in the total number of crashes by approximately 48%, the second method, besides showing a total reduction of 56%, also showed a 57% reduction when analyzing wet-road crashes separately. Thus, the safety effectiveness of resurfacing with gap-graded asphalt has been proved. However, the main contribution of this paper is the application of the DID method, which can create reliable comparison groups and is an alternative to the EB method.

Language: en

Keywords

Difference-in-Differences; Empirical Bayes before-after; Pavement resurfacing; Safety effectiveness